Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/99

Rh analytically, to the satisfaction of all competent and impartial thinkers, that the moral sense is rooted in "the greatest amount of happiness principle" as its sustaining source. In other words, John Stuart Mill, by examining conscience as he found it to exist in man, showed that it depends upon the very principle upon which it ought to depend, supposing Mr. Darwin's theory—elaborated, be it remembered, without any reference to Mr. Mill's analysis, and arrived at by a totally different line of inquiry—concerning the causes of its evolution to be the true one.

Stronger evidence, then, as to the physical causes whose operation has brought human conscience into being, we could scarcely expect, in the present condition of physical science, to possess. It is unnecessary, however, in this place to enter into the details of this evidence, as almost every educated person must be more or less acquainted with them. I shall therefore pass on to the next point which concerns us—namely, supposing the causes of our moral sense to have had their origin in the social instincts, where and to what extent should we expect to find indications of an incipient moral sense in animals? First, then, what do we mean by conscience? We mean that faculty of our minds which renders possible remorse or satisfaction for past conduct, which has been respectively injurious or beneficial to others. This, at least, is what I conceive conscience to be in its last resort. No doubt, as we find it in actual operation, the faculty in question has reference to ideas of a higher abstraction than that of the fellow-man whom we have injured or benefited. In most cases the moral sense has reference to the volitions of a Deity, and in others to the human race considered as a whole. But, if the moral sense has been developed in the way here supposed, its root-principle must be that which has reference to ideas of no higher abstraction than those of parent, neighbor, or tribe. Now, even in this its most rudimentary phase of development, conscience presupposes a comparatively high order of intelligence as the prime condition of its possibility. For not only does the faculty as above defined require a good memory as a condition essential to its existence, but—what is of much greater importance—it also requires the power of reflecting upon past conduct; and this, it is needless to say, appears to be a much rarer quality in the psychology of animals than is mere memory.

Thus, if Mr. Darwin's theory concerning the origin and development of the moral sense is true, we should not expect to find any indications of this faculty in any animals that are too low in the psychological scale to be capable of reflecting upon their past conduct. Whether this limitation does not exclude all animals whatever is a question with which I am not here concerned. I merely assert that, if the theory in question is the true one, and if no animals are capable